Dealing with spiritual things, I am in danger of fooling myself.
It’s a big danger and it is very common.
There is something one of our sages said: “Who can you fool? God can’t be fooled. Other people don’t allow themselves to be fooled.
So the only person you can fool is yourself. But it is not a great achievement to fool a fool.”
I may think that I am in a spiritual realm, and I may be, or I may not be.
But it’s a very easy place in which to fool myself.
One of the big dangers to pilots is that they can’t really sense direction.
They can’t sense whether they are upside down or right-side up.
They don’t really know what is heaven and what is the sea.
And it’s a real danger.
One of the Kennedys was killed just in that way.
He thought that he was rising, and in fact, he was just dumping himself into the sea.
He just didn’t know.
In spirituality it is even easier to do the same thing.
You think that you are soaring, and in fact you are going to drown yourself very deeply.
Faster and faster.
You do all the maneuvers, and everything shows that you are doing the right thing, except that you go very deeply into the sea.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz